XMonad is just a window manager and it does not tweak with settings like fonts, cursor, background or any appearance at all. I'm guessing that you're running xmonad without a DE (Desktop Environment, which is a set of apps that let you easily adjust these this). If you find too difficult (I do) to set them manually (gathering specific apps, commands and config files), you can use xmonad *with* a DE like gnome (I use XFCE), so you won't miss their easiness. Regards, Henrique G. Abreu On Sat, Dec 12, 2009 at 10:51, Yuliang Wang wrote:

Hello everybody! I just moved from gnome to xmonad and think it's good. I prefer fonts not to be smoothed, so in gnome I use gnome-appearance-settings and set the smoothing option to 'none' (other options are 'gray scale' and 'subpixel'). How to configure those in xmonad? (By default, the fonts in firefox in xmonad are smoothed.), and how to set the background and text colors of applications in general?

-- Sincerely, Yuliang Wang

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As others have mentioned, the easiest way to do this is just to run the GNOME settings daemon (or the XFCE/KDE equivalent). If you don't want to do that for some reason, then read on... Yuliang Wang writes:

I prefer fonts not to be smoothed, so in gnome I use gnome-appearance-settings and set the smoothing option to 'none' (other options are 'gray scale' and 'subpixel'). How to configure those in xmonad?

The simple way is to set the corresponding X resources -- you're probably after something like: Xft.antialias: 0 Xft.hinting: 1 Xft.hintstyle: hintfull Xft.rgba: rgb This is what the GNOME settings system is actually doing underneath; graphics toolkits like GTK and Qt then look at those resources to decide how fonts should be rendered. (The usual place to put those lines is in ~/.Xresources, and you can load them into the X server by saying "xrdb -merge ~/.Xresources".) If you want to do something more complicated (e.g. you'd like to disable antialiasing only for some fonts, or only beneath a certain size), you can edit ~/.fonts.conf, which contains custom rules for the fontconfig library that modern applications use to list and select fonts. If you had a font called "Antenna" that you wanted to not be antialiased, then you could say something like: <?xml version='1.0'?> <!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM 'fonts.dtd'> <fontconfig> <match target="font"> <test name="family"><string>Antenna</string></test> <edit name="antialias" mode="assign"><bool>false</bool></edit> <edit name="hinting" mode="assign"><bool>true</bool></edit> <edit name="hintstyle" mode="assign"><const>hintfull</const></edit> <edit name="rgba" mode="assign"><const>rgb</const></edit> </match> </fontconfig> If you left out the element, then it'd apply to all fonts, and thus have more or less the same effect as the resources above, with the exception that it'll also work on old versions of Qt that don't parse the Xft resources properly; this is unlikely to be a problem on a modern system.

[...] how to set the background and text colors of applications in general?

For GTK applications, you can specify the font and theme by putting something like this in ~/.gtkrc-2.0: gtk-font-name = "Liberation Sans 11" gtk-theme-name = "Xfce-curve" -- Adam Sampson http://offog.org/